


how the light gets in

by Ias



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Reminiscing, thomas and flint talk about silver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 04:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11982186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: Piece by piece, Thomas pulls Captain Flint apart. Some parts of him do not go gently, and some are there to stay.





	how the light gets in

**Author's Note:**

> this is the grossest fluffiest thing I've written since 2015
> 
> title taken from anthem by leonard cohen ("there is a crack, a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in.")

Four months, before the question comes around. Three since he and Thomas escaped the plantation, the laughable idea that walls and guns could ever stand between Captain Flint and what he wants. He may not be that man anymore, but he still has the skill set. There’s a place where the tree grows too near the wall, a moment during the change in guards—it’s all James needs. They get out, and their only heading is to turn in the opposite direction of the sea.

No one comes looking. Or if they do, they wouldn’t recognize what they found, the most fearsome pirate in the West Indies building a house on a small plot of land, dirt under his nails instead of blood. Thomas learned the land as James learned the sea, which is lucky, because it turns out James was better with an oar than he’ll ever be with a shovel.

The heat of the day is brutal, with no salt breeze here to cool James’s sweat. They’re sitting side-by-side in the shade of a cherry tree, eating the fruit out of a hat, hoes and a bag of seeds leaning against the trunk. Thomas is close, one leg stretched out and the other crooked, his  knee is just barely resting against James’s thigh—and even now, that’s a fact that James has to carefully turn over in his mind, to feel around its outlines like something too incandescent to see. Thomas is here, Thomas is _alive_ , warm and solid and touching him.

It’s months before the question comes, but James has been counting time in hours. Minutes. Heartbeats.

“So. Who was he?”

James twirls a stem in his fingers and glances at Thomas from the corner of his eye. Slowly but surely, he’s teaching himself how to stop staring as if the world will blink out of existence the second he looks away. There’s a wry smile on Thomas’s lips now, but his eyes are gentle. James ties the cherry stem into a clumsy overhand knot and flicks it away. “Who was who?”

Thomas clucks his tongue in teasing disapproval. “Don’t give me that, James. For weeks you’ve been telling me your story with a very conspicuous hole in it—a man so closely woven into your life that I can hardly make sense of it without him, and yet who you avoid mentioning at all costs.”

There’s nothing in Thomas’s words that James can deny. “What do you wish to know?”

The teasing glint in Thomas’s eyes softens. “I want to know you, James. Every part. If you’ll let me.”

James selects another cherry, buying time. He had never tasted one before Nassau, and was never fond of them when he did—but being around Thomas makes everything brighter, sharper, sweeter, and frankly James could be chewing on another round of raw shark meat without anything to complain about. Thomas shifts his position, the pressure of his knee vanishing—until he feels either the absence or the way that James carefully doesn’t tense, and leans in so their shoulders press to compensate. He’s quiet, waiting.

“He was a friend.”

James had intended to say more, but the words die in his throat like a sail going slack. He wants to deny Thomas nothing, but Thomas wants _all_ of him—and there are pieces of his history that are too sharp for even James to handle, fragments that might cut Thomas to ribbons. But Thomas keeps asking. Doesn’t shy away from the truth, ignore it to fester and it worm beneath James’s skin like shrapnel. Piece by piece, Thomas pulls it out of him.

But this—this. Flint has seen men limp their way from the battlefield with a sword in their gut, live for hours right until the moment the doctor drew the metal from their body. As if the only thing left holding them together was the thing which had killed them. If Thomas was a light too bright to look at, then John Silver is a black pit in James’s heart, and even he can’t know how deep it goes.

A finger slides along the curve of James’s lip, and for a moment he can taste cherries and the salt of sweat, a taste he could open up to and swallow whole. As if Thomas can feel the words James cannot say, gathering on his lips like dew. “He must have been quite the friend, to have even the fearsome Captain Flint tongue-tied.”

James takes Thomas’s hand in his own instead, lowers it gently between their chests. A little smile gathers at the corner of James’s mouth at that, a brief, hoarse laugh. “He was. It’s difficult to explain.”

Thomas hums, wrapping their clasped hands in his own before bowing his head to kiss James’s knuckles. It’s an absent gesture, as natural as breathing, and it takes James’s breath away. It won’t always be like this—it wasn’t before, back in England when they were both softer men. But for now, they touch as if starved for it, because they are.

Thomas glances up, his mouth still hidden behind their entwined hands—his eyes are mischievous. “I’m afraid that if you don’t tell me more, my imagination will inevitably fill in the gaps.”

James only raises an eyebrow at that. It’s all the encouragement Thomas needs to sit back with a grin.

“Let’s see… perhaps he was a rival captain—dashing, rugged, perhaps some artful facial scars—” Memories of governor Rogers resurface unbidden, and James cannot help but wince. “—and of course you would have an epic duel, perhaps swinging from the rigging or crossing swords along the mast—” James snorts in spite of himself. “No?” Thomas has a smile in his voice. “Very well, then maybe he was a flirtatious barkeep at the tavern in your favorite port, who knew _just_ how to pour a glass of rum—”

“Jesus Christ Thomas, you’re as bad as the bloody newspapers.”

“Is it so different from my long lost lover returning to me from an ocean away, after leading a life of adventure and piracy in my name?” Thomas smiles that familiar smile, no less boyish with the addition of a decade and a beard. “Admit it, my dear. From the outside, our story is a bit cliché.”

“Not exactly the word I’d have chosen,” James says, deadpan. Thomas just grins, quite a few more crinkles around his eyes than before, and releases James’s hand to fish another handful of cherries out of the hat. Rather than watch him eat, James stares at his own empty hands in his lap. Stories were never his strong suit. He’s always felt safer in silence, the quiet which spins out between him and Thomas now. Perhaps that has always been his problem. Hard to know how things might have changed, if only he had spoken.

James takes a breath, and lets it out again.

“His name was John.” In saying it, something releases. James lets his head fall back against the rough bark of the tree and closes his eyes against the sunlight filtering through the leaves. “The first time I met him, my crew almost killed him.” A smile tugs at the corner of James’s mouth, lopsided. “The first few times, actually. For being so concerned with his own survival, he certainly had a talent for getting himself in trouble. And yet somehow he always managed to talk his way out of it. The man had an unnatural gift for swaying men’s hearts.”

“And did he talk his way into yours?”

James laughs, even as his chest aches like an old wound. “Not for lack of trying. I swear that man didn’t need to breathe. I used to think that he had made it through life on nothing but his looks and his clever tongue.”

Thomas leans closer to him, their shoulders bumping amicably. “So he _was_ handsome.”

James smiles down at his hands, and after a moment they unclench. “Much more than that, in the end. He was—not kind, and perhaps not even good. But loyal. Terrifying, certainly, but somehow the horror did not consume him.”

“Sounds like someone I know,” Thomas says softly.

James shakes his head. “We weren’t much alike, really. Not at first. I thought for a while that I had taken him and remade him in my image. But he changed me, too. We both became something different.”

There are no more cherries in the hat. Bare stems litter the ground around them, and the sweetness is going sour on the inside of James’s teeth. “He was a right bastard, and a fool, and he betrayed me, and is the reason I’m here.” James falters. Thomas’s hand settles on his shoulder, then slides to touch the nape of his neck. “I’m still not sure whether I hate him for it, or.”

Or.

James twists to meet Thomas’s eyes, half-dreading what he might find there. There are many things that James wants to say. _I lost so much when they took you away, but something grew back in your absence, and it hurts to lose that too. He took everything from me, and then gave a different everything back. He wrote me into a better story, but it was a story without him in it._

“You loved him.” It’s an assurance, not a question, gentle but undeniable. As Thomas speaks it, it becomes true. Like a lens sliding into place, bringing blurred words into sharp focus.

Thomas’s fingers are still drawing circles on the back of his neck. They slide up into his growing hair. Slowly, Thomas pulls him forward until their foreheads are rested together, and James keeps his eyes closed, just breathing him in. To his surprise, it doesn’t feel like letting go. Something is sliding free from his chest, sharp-edged and painful, but it isn’t John. For the first time in months James can invoke that name, remember that face, the glint of his blue eyes and the hard line of his mouth breaking into a smile and his stubbornness and his pride and his devotion. Still there. Still a part of him. Just illuminated, the shadows driven before Thomas’s light.

“You love him.”

James manages a wavering smile. The sunlight is warm and bright—he opens his eyes to meet Thomas’s gaze. “How can I not? He gave you back to me.”

“Now, what would the world say if they learned Captain Flint is a _romantic_?”

James laughs at that, soft in the narrow space between them. “Fuck the world.”

The kiss Thomas presses to his lips is curved with a smile, their hands fumbling together in the darkness behind their eyes. “Now, there’s the man I love.”  


End file.
